Can you make a living from sport betting?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hi,I’m a ruined student by my parents and I’m trying to find something that can make me relax and studious.I want to study sport betting because unlike poker you don’t lose everytime on the board.I posted in another thread that I’m good at math but I don’t know how to calculate certain statistics and I haven’t found a book online.
Here is my grade at mathematics:

[Album] imgur.com

for the 1st semester

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for the 2nd semester
The only problem was linear algebra.
How much math do you need for this hobby? Probability and Statistics?

2

If there was a reliable system to consistently profit from betting, betting shops wouldn’t exist. The house always wins.

So I suppose the answer to your question is yes, you can make a living from betting, by being the bookmaker, not the punter.

3

My understanding is that there is a relatively small number of people who are successful at sports betting. However, they are extremely focused, and do a whole lot of continuous research; I don’t think that one can view sports betting as something that can “make me relax” (to quote the OP), and have any chance at being a long-term winner.

4

Didn’t James Holzhauer make a living as a sports bettor before winning all of that money on Jeopardy?

I suspect it’s like day trading, in that many think they can make money doing it but most lose their shirts trying to.

5

He did, and he used his experience in sports wagering to develop strategies for playing Jeopardy!

6

You pretty much can’t. Far fewer than 0.1% of sports gamblers make anything close to a living wage. You and I are not going to ever be one of them. There is no simple or even complicated formula that will work. The people who have been successful are off the charts intelligent and have been studying this for decades and didn’t quit their day job for a very long time.

Here’s a good test. A lot of the gambling sites have a section where you can gamble with fake money. Try it for a while. After you’ve been consistently successful for a year or so, make the jump.

7

Profitable sports betting (and there is such a thing) is partly about math, but it’s mostly about doing the homework. You need to have more information or better insights than the bookies do, and they base their lines on the public, so you have to beat the public by enough to beat the vig. That is not easy, and the best sports bettors in the world might beat the vig by 2-3% over a long period of time.

The profitable sports bettors I know focus on college basketball mostly, because there are a huge number of games and therefore more chances to find a line out of whack with what you think the true odds are.

Betting on hugely traded gams like the superbowl is strictly for suckers and fans. Those games are far too scrutinized by everyone to uncover information the other bettors don’t have. Whereas heavy research into a college team might uncover some things the bookies don’t really have time to research, such as their performance in the rain, or the fact that a key player is hiding an injury, or whatever.

Sports betting is really tricky because of huge variance. You can bet on a team for reasons, and then they win for different reasons, but because you got the win you think your strategy is good when it’s not. It takes a LONG time to prove out whether you are a winner or a loser overall. Remember, your edge might only be 3-4%, so you’re still losing almost 50% of the time, even if you are a genius.

To make real money requires huge bets. Bet $1,000 on a game with a 3% edge, and your expectation is only $30 for risking $1,000. That’s another reason why college basketball is popular - you can make a LOT of bets and get to the long run sooner and make more money if you’re a winner. If you just make a handful of bets a year, you could go a lifetime without knowing whether your strategy was actually working or not.

The sports bettors I’ve known who were serious would bet $10,000-$100,000 on a game. That’s still only an expectation of $300-$3000, with huge risk. Syndicates and teams are popular for that reason.

One subset of sports betting that can be profitable: Instead of betting with bookies, bet with homies who will put money on their team with outrageous odds. But then you have to collect from them after…

8

You definitely can make a living from sports betting if you’re really good. The bookies offer odds an a lot of different outcomes and their edge is not huge. At one time bookies routinely overpriced the odds of a hole in one at certain golfing events until several people started winning long term on hole in one bets. But if you look at the average soccer game there are hundereds of different things you can bet on.

That’s dozens of simultaneous games each with over a 100 different possible bets at around 7% or so house margin. All you need to do is find one that the bookie’s traders have mispriced. Obviously if you get too good and too obvious you’ll get excluded.

9

It’s been touched upon but I was to reemphasize to the OP that being successful at this takes a tremendous amount of work. You will need to study and work very very hard to get that edge. In fact generally there is not any easy way to success. You can’t get there without a good work ethic.

10

I agree with this. Absent a bookmaker woefully mistaking the odds (which may happen and spotting those could create wagering opportunities), a limited number of sports offer large enough population/sample sizes for reliable forecasting. Probably basketball and baseball, as NFL and college football teams (for example) play too few games for reliable sampling.

That said, even predictions based on MLB’s 162-game season can be unreliable. Look what happened in last year’s postseason. The teams that performed best in the regular season were eliminated in the first postseason round, including perhaps the strongest offense in MLB history (the Braves, who were strongly favored win the World Series).

11

To emphasize this, there are a lot of ‘systems’ floating around for sports betting. None of them work. There are no tricks or shortcuts. You’ve gotta learn a lot, have a lot of discipline and a lot of money, and work your ass off. And then if your luck is bad you could lose for a long time.

There is a principle in statistics called the ‘Kelly Criterion’. It states that if you bet a higher percentage of your bankroll than the odds you are getting, you will eventually go bankrupt even as a winning player. So for example if you have a 3% edge, you should not bet more than 3% of your bankroll. Most gamblers use a ‘half Kelly’ approach to minimize bankroll swings.

To bet $1,000 at a 3% advantage using a half Kelly risk strategy, you would want to start with a $67,000 bankroll, then increase or decrease your gets accordingly as your bankroll grows and shrinks.

12

And if there is a system that works, the inventor is 100% keeping it to themselves.

13

There seems to be more than one goal here. One is to make enough money to live on, and the other is to relax and take the OP’s mind off their studies (with the implied idea that they will then be able to work harder on and do better in their studies).

OP should offer some clarifications of their post: in what way were you ruined by your parents, and with what consequences? How about some context for those grades/test scores, especially the fuzzy blob I am seeing in the second image? I have no idea how to interpret them.

Finally, to speak to the question I quoted, whatever math you may need seems to be only the beginning, apparently continuous and thorough research in every aspect of every sporting event on which you want to bet is required in order to prosper.

If I were interested in sports betting, I think I would focus exclusively on individual-effort events like golf or tennis. Team sports have so many more variables to research.

14

There is one way that people who are good at math and observant can make some money - look for betting line mistakes that can be ‘middled’, or math errors in sports tickets.

A ‘middle’ is when you find two lines that are off by enough that betting both ways on the game guarantees a profit. Then you can bet everything you have. Unfortunately, the internet has sped up line changes with bookies and finding middles is almost impossible now. But back in the day gamblers would pay scouts and runners to check lines all over the place for middle opportunities.

There’s also a ‘sucker middle’ (my term) where you find someone willing to make an outrageous bet with you, then place an offsetting bet with a bookie for a guaranteed win. For example, during playoffs, home team fans will often bet on their team even money, when the bookie lines might be 2:1. Make the homie bet, make half that bet with the bookie the other way, and you make money if the other team wins and break even if it doesn’t. I’ve never done this as I won’t exploit the ignorance of individuals that way, but lots of people do.

Math errors still happen. There have been scratch tickets with positive expectation because someone screwed up. Some gambling mathematicians like Stanford Wong had FAX newsletters that would be sent out to subscribers when an opportunity was found.

A famous sports one was a Canadian sports lotto that got the math for the combo picks wrong, and you were guaranteed a profit if you simply bet on every combination.

Another was a game introduced in Vegas called ‘free ride blackjack’. Every time you got a blackjack, you got a chit good for a free surrender. The casino owner wanted to copywrite the game because it was instantly popular. The reason was because he couldn’t do math, and the game gave even a basic strategy player a 2% advantage. The fax went out, the pros showed up, and within two days the game was gone. Also with a lot of the casino’s money.

Bringing it back to the OP, these ‘side hustles’ require enough math to be able to calculate the odds of a game with arbitrary rules. For sports betting, you need basic statistics, but not much more. You do, however, need an expert level understanding of the game and continuous data collection.

15

In other words, you need to find games where a large number of people are betting irrationally, to a great enough degree to both overwhelm the action of all of the other sensible betters, and to overcome the house take.

That’s your notion of “not huge”!?

To @Sam_Stone 's recent point, of note, famed gambler Jimmy the Greek made his living entirely on side bets: Hang around the craps table, for instance, and wait for someone to say “I’m sure I’ll get snake eyes this time”, and then tell him “Three to one says you don’t”, or the like. Of course, once he got established, Jimmy was in the enviable position of making gambles where the odds were favorable to both sides: Strictly by the money, of course, his marks were getting ripped off, but if they won, they won not only the money, but the ability to say “I beat Jimmy the Greek”, which has its own value.

16

My dumb step son is a gambler. He occasional wins a pool at poker tournaments. When online sports betting opened up in Ohio he decided to “cash in”. He has a small time sports betting site. After a few months someone hit him on one of those "pick 7 quarterbacks) or whatever and it paid $50,000 which wiped him out and left him in the hole. So he took on 2 partners to pay it off and now he only gets 33% of what they make. So some people don’t even make money being the house. Idiot.

17

It’s like getting in on a pyramid scheme, in that very few people end up profiting.

If you want to do sports betting as a hobby, and can work it into your budget, go ahead, but DO NOT expect to turn a profit.

18

If the bookie thinks there’s a 50% chance there will be a throw-in in the 60-65 minute of the Port Vale game it will put it out at odds that reflect implied odds of about 53.5% for each option. (107% total for both options, a 7% total markup). You then only need to be 55% or so sure that there will be or won’t be based on you studying minutae that the traders cannot fully account for in their prices and you’ve got yourself a +EV bet. The more esoteric the bet, the more you can study the odds and possibly be smarter than a bookie.

19

I’m not sure this is correct, but I could certainly be wrong. Can you give an example where this would be true?

20

This confused me too. I thought you bet both sides and if the score is in the middle, you win both bets. If it’s on the outside, you win one and lose one so you pay one vig. It’s a high reward thing.